what's causing my crashes?

[Spekkio]

i'm currently having problems with my desktop computer and i can't rightly isolate the cause. while playing ffxi (i haven't really done that much else w/ it lately so i doubt ffxi is directly causing the problem) my screen will go dark and say no signal (as if i'd disconnected the monitor) but the audio will continue to play for a short while. sometimes it will boot normally after this, sometimes it will crash and try to boot windows again.

this is happening w/ 2 different PSUs so i know it's not an issue w/ that. i've also run memtest on the machine and it came up clean so i'm assuming it's not bad memory. this issue cropped up a while back as a once or twice issue, but it stopped for a while so i stupidly wrote it off as a non-issue but now it's happening constantly.

my best guess is that it's either a problem with the motherboard or a problem with my graphics card. for the record, the graphics card is a GV-NX88T512HP which is a Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GT and the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775. any thoughts on how i can test this or how i can fix this?

[Solefald]

A lot of people have had this problem with Nvidia cards in P35 motherboards, including myself. I ended up RMAing the card then ditching it for an ATI.

If your graphics card is overclocked, reset it to default speeds.

Go into your BIOS MB Intelligent Tweaker page and change the "Performance Enhance" setting. If it's on Turbo, change to Standard; if it's on Standard, change to Turbo. This seemed to fix the issue for me, but by that time the ATI was already in shipment and I didn't feel like messing with it anymore.

You can also try updating the graphics card BIOS.

Also read this >> Possible Black Screen Crash fix??

[Spekkio]

GPU was factory OC'ed at 450 GPU, 900 memory iirc but i've not pushed it past that setting. i'll try fiddling w/ the tweaker and turn it down to standard, but i didn't figure that would affect it if it's a GPU problem as i strongly suspect. the crash fix sure sounds very similar to my situation. i'll research it and see what i come up with. iirc, the first time i bombed out was on the SL cutscene, then today at ks99 wyrm i was getting hosed pretty hard as well as last night while fighting the flans in salvage. i'm currently just standing around in oztroja w/ weather off and such just to see if it can stay stable for any period of time. if it does, that would strongly support the link you included being able to resolve my issues. still, it does not bode well for this card. maybe it's time to think about s**tcanning it and upgrading. it's 18 months old at this point and is rather obsolete, even compared to cards that are a fraction of what i paid, is it not?